Discipline depends on damage to vehicle

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“There’s a drastic difference between being one of the people at the table and then being the person who’s able to make the final decision,” he said.

Our investigation underscores how far Cecile must travel to unravel deeply entrenched departmental failures.

Some of the USA TODAY NetworkSyracuse University-Central Current key findings on Syracuse Police crash data and records from 2013 to 2022:

● The department let bad drivers stay on the road.

● Syracuse PD’s worst offenders had as many as five crashes in this decadelong period. About 70 officers had multiple crashes on their records.

● About 237 police officers involved in Syracuse crashes faced limited accountability. Two-thirds of them got toothless discipline — written reprimands. Only 3% of officers faced the punishment of losing seven days’ pay.

● Several crash investigation reports in Syracuse lacked basic evidence gathering elements, such as interviews of relevant witnesses or speed information from event data recorders, the “black boxes.” Flawed crash reports at times made suing the city more difficult, as victims’ cases floundered without crucial details.

● At least 700 police-involved crashes resulted in zero discipline for officers. The department cleared officers of wrongdoing in most of those incidents,

Syracuse Police Department uses a disciplinary schedule based on the cost of damage done to the vehicle. This can mean that despite the level of harm caused to a civilian, the officer might receive nothing more than a written reprimand.

SOURCE: Syracuse Police Department

including scores that severely damaged taxpayer-funded police cars.

● Some of those zero-discipline cases involved injured civilians.

Syracuse police took a crucial step in 2021 to reduce the trail of economic and human suffering caused by these crashes. Officers started getting emergency vehicle operations course training each year, as opposed to sporadic post-academy training.

Autumn of 2023 marked the end of caps on penalties established in their police union contract that had shielded reckless behavior from consequences.

In September, after our investigative team questioned the discipline policy, the department imposed its first fiveday unpaid suspension on an officer who crashed a cruiser into a house. It added to the highest possible seven-day furlough under the union discipline scale, which varies solely based on the amount of damage done to the police vehicle. The cop ended up losing 12 days of pay.

“We wanted to send a message to the officers out there that this was a potential as well,” Cecile said of the unprecedented discipline.

The department, he added, would “go to the mat” to fight any union attempts to challenge his new progressive discipline directive.

What happens when police hit you?

Buried in hundreds of pages of investigation reports and police data are crucial details about what causes law enforcement crashes, as well as keys to curbing the destruction.

The documents and data showed hundreds of police-involved crashes in Syracuse seemingly boiled down to everyday careless driving mistakes. Take the one officer who took his eyes off the road to dig through a bag before rearending another driver at a red light.

Other officers were driving too fast for icy conditions. Some police sideswiped parked cars, backed into other cop cars and utility poles or clipped civilian motorists while changing lanes unsafely.

The findings underscores the stark reality that many police officers across the country view assertive driving as a necessary risk in their line of work, federal research shows.

Put differently, many police buy into the false narrative that their crashes are inevitable and unavoidable.

“It isn’t always cops driving fast because they’re on some power trip,” said Hope Tiesman, a research epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Scores of other crashes in Syracuse touched on everything from policing technology in vehicles to training officers receive to drive safer during emergency responses. They included the most dangerous collisions during highspeed pursuits or at intersections when officers run red lights.